Tuesday, July 19, 2011

For those who read my ladies blog over at Destination 3977 you'll know that the handover of our house has been delayed by a week due to the fact that the wall our heater is supposed to be put it needs to be made bigger at the top to fit the flue in. No big deal and after a trouble free build a very minor setback.

We are very lucky to be in a position to build this house and I still shake my head everytime I go down there. I have only lived in four places in my life that I can remember - I don't count the first 18 months. I spent all my early life in Box Hill South until I was 24 and then when I got married and moved to Tecoma. I lived there in the family home for a further 24 years and then after splitting with my then wife moved less than 1 kilometer away until Raels and I bought the current house in Ferntree Gully.

Now the move will be to Cranbourne North, way out of my comfort zone but into our dream home, everything single thing about it chosen by us. Raels says that in her mind she is already living there. Me? I wonder when it will actually turn from being the new house into home.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

So we're getting a carbon tax and our most unpopular Prime Minister at her school marmish best says it's for our own good. I watched her being interviewed by Laurie Oakes this morning and after she claimed that yes she did say there would be no carbon tax prior to the last election he asked her what had changed. And we got spin.

LO: But politics is also about leaders being able to win support and to persuade voters. What is the difference between your position now and that of Kevin Rudd when you tapped him on the shoulder, except that the Government is now less popular than it was then and the leader is now less popular than the then leader was? What’s the difference?
JG: Laurie I'm not going to go back in time and talk about those events. I have talked about them...
LO: But you haven’t you see, you have always refused to talk them.
JG: Well I explained why the Labor team made the leadership decision that they did last year. And what they had...
LO: And what is the difference now?
JG: What they have now is me as Prime Minister, pursuing with determination, a plan, that the Labor team believes in. We never thought it was going to be easy. We knew it was going to be tough. We knew we would have to go out and campaign and persuade and get people the facts. And we are determined to do that.
LO: But you see, what they had a year ago was a leader who had been told by you in February he shouldn't go to a double dissolution on pricing carbon, and he had been told by you in April that he should shelve that plan. And now you are out there saying, "I’ve always believed in pricing carbon."
JG: Laurie, you are making a lot of assumptions and I’m not going to share those assumptions with you. I've always believed...
LO: But don't you think you need to answer those questions if people are going to have any faith in you.

This was important for the nation, she was doing what is best for us, no one will be worse off except the big carbon polluters etc, waffle, bull shit. I also remember during the last election when after the first few weeks of campaigning she told us that we would now see the real Julia. Well the real Julia lied when she said there would be no carbon tax so my question is why should we believe anything she says now.

Another thing I am getting very sick of is that because there are people skeptical of the whole man made climate change argument we get told that none of them know what they are talking about, that they are denying climate change exists. Well let me say this. Climate changes. I actually wrote my honours thesis on climate change in the Victorian Alps. I know that 60,000 years ago we were in an Ice Age with gradual warming until a peak around 8,000 years ago when sea levels were actually higher than they are now. And since that time we've had times when the Earth was warmer than now when grapes were grown in Newfoundland in the 11th century, and a Little Ice Age said to have last from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

And we know that climate is also affected greatly by the fluctuations in the Suns outputs, in fact there have been arguments for decades over what causes the periodic Ice Ages but one thing is sure, those massive fluctuations in climate have been occurring independently of anything man has done.

Yeah, I know, some of you will argue, isn't it better that we do something, and I'd say if you guarantee that the rest of the world is gonna be doing the same thing as us then you might be right, but we are a small country of 22 million people and there are cities in India and China that produce as much greenhouse gas in a month as we do in a year and I don't see them rushing to introduce a carbon tax.

The Prime Minister will have us believe that China is cleaning up it's act when in fact it is building bigger coal fired power stations and burning coal they buy from us. So how is it that China buying or coal and burning it is great for the economy and ensures that we will have a strong coal mining industry in the future. And we're supposed to believe that it is better for the world for China to burn our coal than to burn it ourselves. What is the logic to that argument Prime Minister?

I heard our Climate Change Minster interviewed on 3AW a few days ago and she was asked who the Top 10 polluters in the country were. Her answer - "I'm sorry I don't know and I don't have that information with me."

Huh???? You don't know that and yet you can tell me the tax will only raise the price of a packet of Tim Tams by something less than a cent a packet? Doesn't make sense to me. And if you look a t bit more closely at what we do know then you'll see that the government doesn't actually know how many companies will be liable for the tax. See this article from the Annabel Crabb of the ABC. The government knows how much the tax cuts will cost in terms of lower collection of income tax, but they have very little idea about how much carbon tax is going to be collected. And if they don't know that, how is the modelling on the supposed $8/week increase for the average household supposed to hold up. This economic modelling sounds to me pretty much like the global warming modelling. All over the place.

And how is it that all this Treasury modelling and the wonderful tax cuts that 9 out of 10 families will get, are still valid when the day before the tax was announced we were told that the top 1000 polluters would be taxed and the very next day the announcement said it was the top 500. Given it took months of rigorous research and modelling by Treasury to come up with the package in the first instance how was it changed in 24 hours? And was it the real Julia who changed it or one of the other two we saw before the election?

I've heard a lot of Labour supporters try to say that this is the same as John Howard introducing the GST. But the difference is he had the guts to take the issue to an election. This is more like our State Labour Government telling the people of the eastern suburbs that there wouldn't be tolls on Eastlink, prior to the election, and then a week after he was re-elected stating that things had changed.

So that's my rant for the week. And what I've learnt this week is that politicians lie. I was previously very naive wasn't I.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

A week ago Raels and I took our four daughters to see Rock of Ages. It was our second time and their first and I have to say if you get the chance, do yourself a favour and go and have a good time. The music is great, the cast fantastic and obviously enjoying themselves and I haven't laughed so hard for a long time. It was actually better second time around because I knew what was coming.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

She screamed it at me on Thursday night but only after I'd absolutely had enough.

It started as a pretty ordinary train trip home. I was sitting back engrossed in my book "Written in Time" and listening in the background to Sports Today on 3AW (gotta love Tunein Radio as an iPhone Ap).

We got to Box Hill and a couple of disheveled looking young ladies, and I lose the term lightly, got on and wandered up the carriage past me. It wasn't long until the voices were raised loud enough to not only interfere with my radio listening but distracting of my reading as well.

Like "young ladies" seem to do more often these days there was a lot of effin c's and various other colourful phrases. I picked up that the older looking slag was 28 and one of the others who also boarded the train but from a different door was 18. The older one was yelling and screaming something about the younger one muttering about her under her breath. When a few other people started to vacate that end of the carriage and move down past where I was sitting I turned around to see what was going on and saw the younger one seated with the older one standing above her blocking her in and leaning down screaming in her face. They were both clearly, drunk, drug affected or both and as I watched it was suddenly on and a full blown cat fight started, the screaming and swearing continued and the hair pulling and scratching had started.

I had enough. I took the earphones out and tucked them into my pocket, I asked the young girl opposite me to look after my pack and I went and grabbed the 28 year old from behind and pulled them apart. Whilst I restrained her the other girl was ushered into another carriage by two other companions.

The two now separated physically I let the older one go and told her to sit down and shut up.

"You're not a fucking copper," she yelled in my face.

I turned walked away and sat back down.

"Do you know who I am?," she screamed at the top of her voice. "I'm a member of the P...gill family!" Spit flying from her mouth the stud on her tongue almost sticking up her nostril as she spat the vitriol at me.

And for those who don't know. That statement about her family history alone says it all really and shows precisely why that "young lady" actually doesn't really have much of a future. There will be many more fights ahead for her, angry, bitter, full of a false pride in a family that has no respect at all in my world. I wish her luck but reckon she's more likely to end up in a gutter somewhere.

Incidentally, not one other person intervened. They were all happy to sit there and ignore what was happening whilst a young girl, who may or may not have caused it in the first place, got the crap beaten out of her. WTF is that all about.